1. Wandering Jews - from Galicia to Vienna; 2. Freud's Bildung; 3. Science as vocation; 4. Starting out in Vienna; 5. A theoretical excursus; 6. 'Dear magician'; 7. Becoming the first psychoanalyst; 8. Jung and the Counter-Enlightenment; 9. Exorcising the 'Odium Jungian'; 10. 'What is painful may none the less be real' - loss, mourning, and Ananke; 11. Making sense of the death instinct; 12. Leaving heaven to the angels and the sparrows - Freud's critique of religion; 13. Late Freud and the early mother.
This book presents a radical look at the founder of psychoanalysis in his broader cultural context, addressing critical issues and challenging stereotypes.
Joel Whitebook is a philosopher and psychoanalyst who maintained a private practice in New York City for twenty-five years. He is currently on the faculty of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, and he is the Director of the University's Psychoanalytic Studies Program. He is also the author of Perversion and Utopia (1995) and numerous articles.
'This is a brilliant book that combines psychoanalytic thinking and
intellectual history to demonstrate that Freud remains central to
current debates not only in psychoanalysis, but also in cultural
theory, philosophy and gender studies. With his expertise in
psychoanalytic theory, Joel Whitebook elucidates the development of
Freud's thinking and presents a radically new way of reading him.
He appropriates insights from feminism, pre-Oedipal theory, and
clinical experience with non-neurotic patients to transform our
picture of the founder of the field. When one focuses on early
development, the maternal presence and the repudiation of
femininity, Freud no longer appears as another dead white male, but
as a vital thinker whose ideas have important consequences for the
contemporary world.' Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, Director of the
Columbia University Psychoanalytic Center's Parent-Infant Program,
and member of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and of the
Société Psychanalytique de Paris
'Whitebook has written a distinctive kind of intellectual
biography, with a rich and complex agenda, which is far from
reproducing those already available. He offers a perspective on
Freud that incorporates new developments in psychoanalytic thinking
and integrates psychoanalysis with broader philosophical
trajectories. The result is outstanding: a biography with
intellectual force that captivates its reader.' Sebastian Gardner,
University College London
'Despite all attempts to bury him, Freud remains the ultimate
revenant, haunting the twenty-first century at a time when all the
best efforts to outgrow our self-incurred immaturity have come to
naught. Drawing on his sustained experience as a practicing
psychoanalyst and deep immersion in contemporary theory, Joel
Whitebook shows how relevant many of Freud's ideas remain. By
linking critical elements of Freud's thought with crucial aspects
of his life - his vexed relationship with his mother, troubled
friendships with Fliess and Jung, ambivalent response to war, and
ruminations on mortality - he offers a fresh and insightful
reading, neither excessively pious nor reductively dismissive, of a
thinker we are only beginning to understand and from whom much
is still to be learned.' Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman
Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley
'With the clinical acumen of an analyst and the intellectual rigor
of a philosopher, Joel Whitebook gives us a Freud for our
disenchanted but perhaps a bit wiser times. Never minimizing the
greatness of the thinker or the magnitude of his achievement,
Whitebook makes extensive and judicious use of the recent scholarly
critiques of the man and his work, as well as of the expanded scope
of psychoanalysis that has deepened, augmented, and where necessary
corrected Freud's own inaugural discoveries and formulations,
pursuing his inquiry with Freud's own ideal of the relentless
pursuit of the truth. In the resulting brilliant study of the
intertwining of the life and the work, we recognize a very human
Freud with outsized gifts and equally outsized flaws and
limitations, neither idealized nor condemned for his very real but
comprehensible weaknesses and blind spots, but understood in the
light of analytic neutrality in the best sense.' Robert Paul,
Charles Howard Candler Professor of Anthropology and
Interdisciplinary Studies, Emory University, Atlanta
'The distinguished psychoanalytic scholar and analyst Joel
Whitebook's lively new intellectual biography of Freud gives us a
strikingly plausible view of its subject. With special attention to
Freud's tangled family circumstances in childhood, Whitebook evokes
a figure of the 'dark enlightenment,' committed to the ideal of
scientific inquiry yet fully aware of the irrationalities, even the
pre-oedipal ones, to which the enquiring mind is subject. Whitebook
reads this attitude in relation to Freud's personal and
professional 'break with tradition.' He also engages with the
feminist critique of Freud by pursuing the theme of 'the missing
mother,' the absence of women as protagonists in any of Freud's key
dramas being, in his view, a submerged but haunting presence
occasioned by the disappearance or 'psychological death' of his
earliest caregivers. This book is well worth promoting to the top
of the queue on anyone's Freud reading list.' Paul Fry, William
Lampson Professor of English, Yale University
'Joel Whitebook presents to us an extraordinary new biography of
Freud. In contrast to the classical biographies he is in a position
to use our current psychoanalytic knowledge on the early
development of the child and the early mother-child relationship to
show the development of Freud's personality and his theoretical
work in a new light. The missing of the maternal dimension in the
unfolding of his ideas was one of the most important consequences
of Freud's early traumatic experiences for his thinking. With his
profound psychoanalytic and philosophical knowledge, great empathy
and integrative strength Whitebook brilliantly describes the
central motifs, the creative ways and also the wrong tracks in the
development of Freud's theoretical thinking, confronting it with
critical issues in contemporary psychoanalysis and philosophy … His
book is a masterpiece.' Werner Bohleber, author of Destructiveness,
Intersubjectivity, and Trauma: The Identity Crisis of Modern
Psychoanalysis and editor of Psyche
'Whitebook is fascinating on the historical theme of 'the break
with tradition' both in 19th century intellectual life and in
Jewish history.' Jane O'Grady, Daily Telegraph
'An elegant foray into the man and his mind … rich and
illuminating.' Lisa Appignanesi, The Guardian
'At almost 500 pages and supported with extensive footnotes, the
book is a treasure trove for readers who want to better understand
one of the most significant and prolific minds of the last 150
years.' Mike Phelps, Simply Charly (www.simplycharly.com)
'… it should be mandatory reading for graduate students in the
field of psychiatry.' C. D. Quyn, San Francisco Book Review
(www.sanfranciscobookreview.com)
'… strongly argued, well-informed … a sensitive account.' Stephen
Frosh, Jewish Chronicle
'The book is a readable, enjoyable and well-documented biography of
Freud that summarizes current scholarship, and makes good use of
recently published archival materials.' Metapsychology
'This book is more than merely a descriptive path through Freud's
life. More accurately, it is a case study of Freud's life using the
ideas that Freud pioneered. Many sources are traditional and
historical, but Whitebook also expertly incorporates recent
publications in the area of Freud studies - whose emergence shows
no sign of abating.' Choice
'Professor Whitebook is an insightful scholar and a remarkably
readable writer and he has skillfully steered his way between the
hagiographers and the 'Freud bashers'. He always has an eye for the
telling detail.' The Quarterly Review
''Does the world need another biography of Sigmund Freud?' Perhaps
no longer, for Whitebook has covered an extraordinary amount of
territory. What one is left with upon closing the covers of this
'intellectual biography', it should be further noted, is something
more than an identification of the sociocultural milieu in
question, something more than a drawing out of the interrelation of
the life and work of the subject, and something more than a
comprehensive investigation into the historical implications of
each: one is left, whether or not it was the author's intention,
with an ever deepening sense of compassion for one of the greatest
thinkers, founders even, of the modern era.' Lois Oppenheim,
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
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